The craving of these old navigators for some form of good sea timekeeper is shown by Kelly's suggestion for finding the longitude by what he calls "automatas, or unerring clocks or watches," or even by "hour-glasses," directions being given for "preparing and using a very perfect and true-running sand glass, which may precisely run twenty-four hours without error, to be set exactly at noon on leaving the land; which glass upon being run out, is to be turned instantly every day, not losing any time in the turning of it; and so having very warily kept the said glass 'til you think good to make an observation at noon, and having in readiness an half hour, minute, and half minute glass, you may thereby know exactly how much the twenty-four hour glass is before or after the ship's time; the difference being your longitude, east or west, according as the time by the sun is afore or after the time by the glass." Navigation by account, or dead reckoning, has changed little since Kelly's time. Indeed, the use of the chronometer and the perfection of the modern sextant has almost superseded it except in the case of small coasters, &c. But in Kelly and Woodes Rogers' days the log chip, reel, line, and half minute glass were the mariner's sole means of finding his longitude, or distance, sailed east or west. Steam and patent logs have much simplified such calculations, which required many corrections not only for leeway but for errors in the log line and glass; "Shortness of the knots in a line," says Kelly, "being on the safer side, that a ship be not ahead of her reckoning; it being better to look for land before we come at it than to _be ashoar before we expect it._" SEA STORMS, ANCIENT AND MODERN. Are the storms at sea of this century heavier than those of the time of Queen Anne? is a question one can hardly help asking after studying the logs of the "Duke" and "Dutchess" during their three years' cruise. Judging from Rogers' account, the whole of this period must have been one of remarkably fine weather at sea, even in the latitude of Cape Horn, as compared with the tempests torn to tatters which we constantly fall in with in the sea stories of to-day. Or perhaps Capt. Woodes Rogers was of that old type of happy sea-dog for whom the song was written in which Jack "pities them poor folk ashore," when a storm comes on? Or perhaps "life on the ocean wave" in his time was really not so terrible for sailormen as it is now? These questions are not easily answered, for even among comparatively recent sea-writers, such as Marryat and Dana, life afloat, though not described as all smooth sailing, is never described as all hurricane and hurlyburly. Like a true seaman Marryat delights to draw pictures of men at home on the sea, and well able to contend with wind and wave, rather than write of ships with sails torn to shreds, and crews taking to drink as soon as they are caught in a close-reefed topsail breeze off Cape Horn.